


Kimjang

by stet



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: But no Kim Jong-Un jokes I pinky promise, Dark Comedy, Gen, Historical Hetalia, Hurt/Comfort, I'm not that insensitive, OC, Platonic Relationships, Thinly veiled references to current events, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-15
Updated: 2018-02-15
Packaged: 2019-03-18 20:00:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13688787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stet/pseuds/stet
Summary: Where peace talks fail, kimchi succeeds – if only for an afternoon. Im Yongsoo reflects on his estranged brother. Platonic North/South Korea.





	Kimjang

**Author's Note:**

> North Korea's human name is Han Juchae (pre-partition, Im Taesoo). I punctuate South Korea's name as Im Yongsoo. Otherwise, canon APH names and country names are both used at various points. All dialogue between the Koreas is implied to be in Korean.

It was a sultry September afternoon in Seoul. He had been in a chipper enough mood when he’d picked up his landline, full and happily buzzed from a languorous business lunch. But as soon as he heard the note of terror in the aide’s voice, Im Yongsoo felt a wave of nausea ripple through him.

“Call for you, sir – from the emergency line.”

There was no need to ask who was calling.

“Put him through,” he sputtered.

This was all happening too fast. When the end came, it would be duly cinematic – or so he imagined. He’d be hunched over some map in a covert mountainside bunker, properly attired in BDU, helmet and bilingual armband, Alfred coaching him via speakerphone in his most diplomatic English, a swath of advisors and military commanders reading off statistics and coordinates. And then – well, he wasn’t entirely sure, but something more memorable than a phone call. Fire and fury, whatever that meant. 

This must just be some false alarm, he decided, as his sweaty fingers fumbled with the handset. This couldn’t be the way it would happen.

There was a pause, a brief dial tone, a long, terrible silence – and then a click.

“Good day, Southern dog,” the voice on the other end barked, the accent thick and coarse as sandpaper.

“Hello, brother.”

“It is good that I can simply telephone you directly now.” Said flatly, as if this were a standard pleasantry. As if this were a normal call.

“Yes, it is,” he said, uncertainly.

There was a genuinely awkward three-second lull. Then Han Juchae continued, businesslike.

“I am calling to request your presence in exactly 48 hours at Daeongsong-dong,” he said, answering the question Yongsoo had been physically aching to ask. “The address will be sent to you shortly via electronic mail. You will come alone, unarmed and unaccompanied. I will do the same. Bring no less than 50 kilograms of cabbage, an appropriate quantity of earthenware pots, and any other provisions you may require.”

“Provisions?”   
  
“Yes. Namely chili flakes, garlic, flour, sugar, salt, ginger, _saeujeot_ –“

Yongsoo felt his jaw unclench and fall open.

“You’re fucking kidding me,” he blurted.

“What?”

Instinctively he stood, his free hand slamming down on his desk. “Kimjang?” 

“Yes,” the North replied, matter-of-factly. “Kimjang.”

* * *

 

The address Juchae sent him turned out to be a prefab rectangular structure. It was made of concrete slabs with a corrugated steel roof, with two doors and a window, and was roughly twice the diameter of an industrial shipping container. The exterior was undecorated, save for a garland of hibiscuses and Korean magnolias strung from the roof. A sign in painted red Hangul hung above the south-facing entrance. Under the address, it bore the disconcerting designation _Test Kitchen 3._  

The interior of the building consisted of a huge, garish kitchen. To Yongsoo’s eyes, it looked for all the world like something straight out of the set of a circa-1960’s American-style cooking show. (Later he would ask himself if that wasn’t _exactly_ what it was.) The walls were a garish yellow, the countertops an age-tinted glass. Beside them were two industrial-sized porcelain sinks. A massive stove and matching dual-decker oven took up the entire rear quarter of the room. Everything appeared to be connected to local power lines and pipes, though it was hard to imagine there _being_ any in such a remote area. The obligatory North Korean father-son-and-grandson portraits hung just above the tallest kitchen cabinet, as though whoever stuck them there had wanted to give them the highest possible vantage point. Idly Yongsoo wondered if that’s where the bugs were – though that would’ve been far too predictable, especially by North Korean standards.

Kimjang. The word had such a loaded meaning. He had always been an orphan in the human sense, lacking genuine blood relatives, but somehow he’d never had to prepare his stock of winter kimchi alone. Someone would inevitably recruit him. He’d volunteered at scores of temples and churches, had hauled cabbages to homeless shelters and hospices, had been the unannounced but knife-handy guest in countless homes. Even amongst strangers, there was something deeply comforting about the familiar routine. More than once, in his postwar catatonia, the sting of chili paste in his cracked cuticles had been the only thing reminding him he was alive. Through war, revolution, suicide and fratricide and the looming threat of apocalypse – kimjang was a yearly constant.

It was hard not to read some deeper meaning into Juchae’s invitation. _What_ precisely the North wanted, though – that still puzzled him. For his part, Alfred had begged Yongsoo not to go. It was dangerous. So much could go so wrong. But it would have been difficult to turn down an invitation from a Nation who was, despite everything, still the closest thing he had to a brother. Han Juchae had been born _Im Taesoo_ , after all.

Yongsoo opted to arrive five minutes early, dressed in a t-shirt and his least favorite pair of designer jeans. Juchae marched in precisely 48 hours after their call, predictably through the second, north-facing door. He was shorter than Yongsoo remembered, standing at least a head below him, and was painfully thin, his cheekbones so sharp and cheeks so gaunt they looked like they’d been gouged out of his face. He still wore his hair in a single thick braid, which now reached well past his shoulders, though a few errant locks were short enough to slip free. He sported his usual officer’s cap and jacket, the waist belt cinched tight, along with drab pants and calf-length combat boots – though true to his word, he appeared to be unarmed.

Juchae stuck out his hand stiffly. It was closer to a salute than an invitation to shake. But Yongsoo obliged regardless, clasping their palms together and offering his grim-faced brother a smile. Juchae replied with a stare.

“It’s good to see you,” he offered.

“Yes.”

“It has been a long time since we last met face-to-face.”

“Yes.” Juchae broke off the handshake. “Did you bring the cabbages? And the pots?”

Yongsoo nodded back towards the south-facing door. “Everything’s in boxes outside.”

“I see.” He strode past Yongsoo, slammed the door open and paced out into the sun. Yongsoo followed.

After ten minutes of hauling, they’d managed to bring all the kimchi accoutrements inside, including Yongsoo’s not-insubstantial collection of pots. They stacked the cabbage heads in piles, covering the countertop. Then Juchae vanished back through the northern door for a moment, only to begin wheeling in his own set of pots. They looked rather battered by comparison, Yongsoo thought. One bore a conspicuous scorch mark. From a long-ago mortar shell, maybe. The damn things looked that old.

Slicing the cabbage was the first step. Yongsoo was about to offer to do it when his brother reached into one of the kitchen drawers, producing a large chef’s knife. He turned to face Yongsoo, pointing the steel at him.

 “You said no weapons,” Yongsoo stammered.

“I said no firearms.” He scowled.

“You said you would be ‘unarmed’.” Yongsoo hesitated.

 Juchae rolled his eyes, letting his grip on the knife slacken a bit. “Well, _anything_ is a weapon to a well-trained soldier. I should not have to say that.” He turned back to the cabbages, taking one in his hand. “How else did you plan to do this?” A _crack_ as he cut the stalk in two. “Do you use some automatic cabbage-slicing device in the South? Or do you pay poor workers to do it for you?”

Yongsoo bit his lip. It was a fair point. He held out a hand. “Give me a knife. I want to do half of them.”

Juchae flipped the knife around and handed it over, handle-first. He flashed a conniving little smirk. Then he pried a paring knife from the drawer, making short work of two dozen heads of cabbage. Even with the longer blade, Yongsoo struggled to keep pace. 

* * *

 

There was remarkably little discussion of the actual kimchi-making procedure. When the cabbage had been quartered, the two brothers worked side by side, silently stuffing the leaves with handfuls of salt from a shared bowl. Once they’d left the cabbage to brine, they began slicing the vegetables. Juchae delegated the carrots and radishes to himself, while Yongsoo cut the onions and chives.

As the minutes ticked by, Yongsoo found himself growing calmer, more complacent. Arguably the most violent and dangerous Nation on earth was standing mere meters from him, the same man who’d tried for half a decade to reach across the 38th and slaughter him in the night. But it was hard to maintain the appropriate level of fear. In the yellow afternoon light, the North was not some shadowy omnipresent danger but a living entity, something that breathed and blinked. Time and his own brutal history had marred Juchae’s features, had shrunken his spine and scarred his skin, but to this day the resemblance was undeniable. Cut away the snarled dark hair, buff away the gnarled callouses, nourish the bony body until the eyes were no longer sockets, until the ribs no longer stuck out beneath the skin – and this man would be his twin.

It was worse during the war. Yongsoo could remember those long muddy nights so clearly, when the crash of mortar shells had reverberated like drums inside his skull. The red strip of fabric Juchae wore tied across his bangs was sometimes the only thing marking him as the enemy – as a Communist, a traitor, a tyrannical madman. When at last they’d clashed in the trenches, rolling in the dirt like fighting dogs, he’d had to bayonet his own mirror image. A man could go insane doing that, over and over and over again. Any man, Yongsoo kept telling himself. Any man, no matter his history. 

In a very real sense, the war had never ended for Juchae. Yongsoo had blamed America for that. Even as he fattened himself on UN rice rations and curled up under UN hospital blankets, he could remember those surges of grief and fury, welling up inside him like a piece of shrapnel buried in his skin. His ally was uniquely talented at waging war. As devastated as Yongsoo’s own country was, it paled in comparison to the horrors of the North. _Worse than Japan_ , he kept hearing the medics say, as they bandaged and rebandaged him. No wonder Juchae had lost his mind. He’d never had a chance.

And yet the world’s superpowers had spared Juchae, when their lukewarm war had grown too costly. It would have been kinder to put him down early, like the sick and illegitimate thing he was. But they had shrugged their shoulders and allowed him to live. And now he was here, a walking corpse up to his wrists in matchstick-cut carrots. 

Yongsoo was glad he wasn’t the type to cry over onions. Juchae would have taken his tears for pity.

* * *

 

Things went on like this, uncontentiously, until it came time to make the kimchi paste.

Yongsoo had busied himself with making the thin flour-water-sugar solution that would serve as the base. He stood hunched over the stove, stirring the mixture diligently. Beside him, Juchae was still chopping away, though he’d moved on to mincing the fermented fish and shrimp and slicing the ginger.

A lot of ginger, Yongsoo noticed. A _lot_ of ginger. The sharp scent pricked at his nose. When he glanced back at the other man over his shoulder, he saw Juchae cutting up a whole root, his fingers curled around one bulb, eyes squinting in concentration.

“You aren’t going to use that _whole thing_ , are you?”

Juchae glanced up, uncomprehending. “Yes, I am.”

“That’s a lot. You’re just supposed to put a dash in.” He made a pinching gesture with his thumb and index finger. “Just a little bit. For flavor. You don’t want it to be overpowering.”

“This is the correct amount.” Juchae kept chopping.

“There is no ‘correct’ amount,” Yongsoo muttered. “Isn’t that kind of the point?”

Juchae didn’t seem to hear him. Yongsoo’s hands fell to his sides.

“Don’t tell me you use the exact same recipe every year. Even you aren’t that stubborn.”

The other man kept working in silence, chopping until he’d reduced the ginger root to a shiny lump of pulp on half of his cutting board. Then he set down his knife, exhaled slowly, and looked back at Yongsoo. His gruff staccato accent masked the exasperation in his words.

“We have all of this ginger to use. So we will use it. We use what we have. Whatever we have – that is the correct amount.”

Juchae lifted a hand, pointing back towards the stove. The pale white liquid had reached a frothing boil. Flustered, Yongsoo hurried to shut off the burner, cringing when a few stray droplets splashed against his hands.

When Juchae began adding a lethal quantity of chili flakes to their kimchi paste, Yongsoo swallowed his objections. When the North dumped in three whole jars of fish sauce, he didn’t say a word. _Use what we have_. Yes, he reflected, that was right. 

As a rule, kimjang was not a solitary activity, and even less so in the great communal North. The sheer amount of physical labor necessitated at least one partner, if not several families’ worth of help. So the request, abrupt as it was, had not struck Yongsoo as fundamentally strange. They were family, and doing this together was eerily normal, natural. Some in his government had chosen to interpret it as an olive branch, a sign of a diplomatic thaw to come. Everyone wanted to be optimistic.

But it occurred to him, as they began filling the damp, salt-shrunken cabbage leaves with handfuls of paste, that Juchae hadn’t brought any ingredients himself. He had come with empty jars.

* * *

 

Actually preparing the kimchi was the most tiring part. They knelt across from each other, each filling their own jar from a common stockpile. The kitchen was poorly ventilated, and soon the hot air was thick with the scent of garlic. Yongsoo’s t-shirt stuck to his skin, a thin sheen of sweat across his brow. Juchae held out as long as he could, but eventually shed his jacket, revealing a gnarled and bony torso covered by a threadbare white wifebeater. His shoulder blades stuck out from his chest at severe right angles, his arms gawky and mottled with scars.

At one point, Yongsoo found himself idly whistling the melody of Blackpink’s “Whistle,” folding and twisting cabbage leaves to the beat. As if in response, his brother started humming a military march, the tune faintly familiar but its origins escaping him. (Months later, Yongsoo would hum a few bars for Ivan, who would cackle morbidly and identify it as “The Sacred War.”) Rather than try to drown each other out – neither had the energy – they soon returned to their earlier silence.

By the sticky, humid glow of late afternoon, they were filling the last few jars with kimchi, their hands stained a gory red. Yongsoo sealed the last one, a great earthenware pot the size of an oil drum, and collapsed theatrically against the oven door, letting his legs slacken and his rear slide back down onto the floor. Juchae sat down as well, knees to his chest, back to the under-sink cabinet.

A few seconds passed. Yongsoo closed his eyes. Then, abruptly, the North spoke.

“I have been thinking… I want to tell you something. In case something bad happens, and I cannot tell you later. Will you listen?”

Yongsoo’s eyes snapped open. He slapped his hands palm-down against the floor, his legs tensing under him, as though he was preparing to leap to his feet. _In case something bad happens._ The words made his heart freeze in his chest. Those apocalyptic daydreams danced before his eyes again – men in masks, army generals, bunkers, prayers, blood-red fire.

“I’ll listen,” he murmured, leaning over.

Juchae nodded, folding his arms across his chest.

“When you leave here, you will go back to Seoul. You will walk into your bedroom, close the door, lie down and close your eyes. And then you will sleep. I have not done that in more than 50 years – just calmly, peacefully sleep the whole night through.” His chest rose and fell with a long exhale. “It has been a long time since you have felt fear like that, if you ever have. But fear is in my blood, brother. Fear smothers me like a thick black fog, and in that blackness I have done terrible things. Maybe–“ He grappled with the words. “Maybe I confuse you. Maybe you think I am a lunatic. You think I want war, death, destruction. But it is just because you do not understand me. You do not understand that fear.”

“I’m afraid of you.”

That angered Juchae. It was like he’d thrown a switch. He jolted to face Yongsoo, lip curled into a snarl.

“ _Listen_ ,” he hissed. “You never _listen_ , you damn pig! This is different!”

“What are you so afraid of, then?” Yongsoo snapped back, shoulders hunching defensively.

“ _All_ of them,” Juchae said, gesturing grandly with one chili-stained hand. “America and all his puppets, China, Japan, Russia – and you, you Southern dog, you!” Suddenly he scrambled to his hands and knees, leaving a smear of red across the floor. Yongsoo inched back, sliding across the oven door until he’d cornered himself against a row of cabinets. Juchae leapt forward, grabbing fistfuls of Yongsoo’s shirt.

“They’ll kill me the second let my guard down,” he roared, shaking Yongsoo, jerking his neck around, beating a slick hand against his chest. “The world wants me dead! Everyone, everyone! An end to the Revolution! Fear is what keeps me alive! Don’t you understand? They’d kill me, if I let them! They’d _kill_ me! They’d _kill_ me! _They’d kill me!"_  

Yongsoo was too stunned to struggle, his head throbbing from the whiplash. Juchae panted, fresh sweat beading beneath his bangs. When he let go, the spike of adrenaline apparently exhausting him, Yongsoo sprang to his feet. Together, they caught their breath.

“Do you really believe that?” Yongsoo finally blurted, when he felt capable of forming words.

“Of course I do,” the other man answered hoarsely. He hung his head, as though now aware and ashamed of his outburst. “It is true. You know it is true.”

Without another word, Yongsoo straightened, paced over to the sink, and scrubbed off his hands. He set a pot of water on to boil, rifled through the boxes of dried goods near the doorway and produced a package of white rice. Juchae stayed kneeling where he was, as though rooted to the spot. While the rice cooked, Yongsoo retrieved two mixing bowls from one cabinet, set them on the counter, pulled a serving spoon from a drawer and scooped a heap of kimchi into each. He split the rice into two portions, adding slightly more to the other bowl than to his own. Then he dug around in the boxes again, checking each crevice, until he managed to find a half-empty package of disposable wooden chopsticks. Before the sun had set, their dinner was ready.

Yongsoo crouched down on the floor and slid Juchae his portion of _geotjeori_. At first he made no move to take it, but the clean, sweet smell of fresh rice and the audible crackle of sesame seeds between his brother’s teeth did eventually rouse him from his trace. He washed up, and then they ate, the crunch of cabbage substituting for conversation. Yongsoo supposed he’d expected Juchae to wolf it all down, but instead he picked at the food, stretching out each bite as long as possible. Savoring it.

“Could be hotter,” the North sniffled. “But it will do.”

* * *

 

As far as the cold was concerned, in Manhattan was always a pleasant surprise. He arrived at World Summits ready for ice, snow and howling wind of Gangwon-do, but even on bad days, a latte and a thin down coat were usually more than enough. They spent the entire session indoors, anyway, their noses buried in the Security Council’s latest brief. Asia was on the brink of war, everyone was saying. There was no time for frolicking in Central Park. There was barely time for lunch.

By the third straight day of back-to-back strategy meetings, Yongsoo sank into a kind of malaise. They were talking about _him_ here, he knew, but he couldn’t make himself focus. He needed distraction. To drink, fuck, go to fucking Disneyland – _something_ more pleasant than mulling over nuclear war. He didn’t want to think about this. About _him,_ about the reality of it all _._ He longed for instant gratification. How Alfred balanced his hedonism with running the damn world, he couldn’t begin to imagine. The week passed insufferably slowly.

It wasn’t until he’d returned home to Seoul, that bright beacon of madness, that he remembered the jars. How he’d sequestered them away in the special kimchi refrigerator Taiwan had bought him last New Year. He flipped on the news – terrifying, as always, but he was inured to it – and switched on his rice cooker. Then he rolled the smallest jar out and hoisted it onto his kitchen counter.

He cracked open the lid. Inhaled – good. Plucked a choice cabbage leaf with his chopsticks. Took a bite.

His eyes stung. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I am not Korean and have never made kimchi, so if I have made any substantial cultural/linguistic/etc. errors, please let me know in the comments.


End file.
